As a ferocious liberal who does not like the Left-Right dichotomy, which artificially polarizes us, and as an Appalachian, born and raised in the Laurel Highland Mountains of Western Pennsylvania, bituminous coal country, I became radicalized by witnessing the culture war waged against my region over decades, especially in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was in office.
Such blind hate arose and such punishing, draconian laws from the GOP were imposed, that I watched my father’s generation more or less destroyed, reduced to poverty through no fault of their own. The stigma borne by the people of this and other such regions remains as a stain on our public discourse to this day.
It’s a remnant of the vicious culture war, which prefers categorizing people to understanding them, and prefers demonizing to empathizing.
Many of the groups are uneducated, and kept in poverty, by said culture war. They’re shamelessly manipulated by blatant lies and warped views. Think FOX News or the bloviators such as Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and Jones.
Those people cling to such propaganda because it feeds them what they want to hear, fueling their sense of oppression and righteous anger. They’re kept ignorant and terrorized: “Obama’s coming for your guns, he’s a Kenyan Ilsamofascist, he’ll force you to burn your bibles and flags, his secret army under the abandoned Wal-Marts, JADE HELM, will rise up to slaughter you…”
On and on, crazier and more paranoid, all to keep the panic high and the thinking low, all to create a bloc vote to ensure the gerrymandering and vote suppression can remain slanted steeply against any kind of fair representation.
This is how we can have a government espousing policies 85% of us oppose.
Now think about those labeled groups again. Appalachians. Muslims. Illegal Immigrants. Military. Teachers. On and on.
Fact is, these groups are comprised of people. Human beings who laugh, cry, bleed, and die. They’re just trying to get along but they’re largely trapped in an economic sink-hole created by the rich in order to suck more money out of America while giving back less and less.
It is the 1%, directed by the 1/10th of 1%, via the instrumentality of the GOP, (Gang Of Psychopaths), calling these unfair bank shots. That’s who’s taken over now and we’re seeing the results.
People in general, viewed as a mob, might well be unutterably stupid, but each person in that crowd is likely very smart on many topics, have world experience that’s valuable and worth learning, and is a caring, living human being.
It is the others, the people-shaped things, the predators among us who only look like us: It is the psychopaths who have destroyed so much and created such divisiveness, because it helps them. Divide and conquer. Keep us at each other’s throats so we don’t notice their vile crimes.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson once explained, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” He was right. It is this cynical ploy the right wing uses against us.
Now look at the trumpers: They do not vote FOR anything, always AGAINST things, AGAINST people. “I just want Hillary to LOSE,” they howled. “I don’t want more of the same lawless crime and open borders,” they cried, not understanding that this was a lie fed them by unconscionable GOP policy.
It’s always a lash-out vote against a target identified for them by the archly-pointing, bellicose, vein-popping roar of the accusative blamers, the GOP, and it is always about greed, fear, and hate. Always negative emotions to cancel clear thinking and informed decisions; it’s predictable.
It has brought us now to realize the republicants, the GOP leadership in particular, sold America out to the Russians, committing treason in exchange for profit and power. In a frenzy of greed, fear, and hate, they seek to undo all the progress I’ve seen over my lifetime toward a safe, clean, prosperous world. If they can’t have it all, no one will have any, shriek the crazies of the GOP. They are scorched-earth nihilists, intent on destroying “Obama’s legacy” and on “shrinking the government to a size we can drown in a bathtub,” to cite Grover Norqvist’s sick lust for murder.
Taking us all down with them, they are now removing all restraints from corporate malfeasance, crime, and pollution. It is a free-for-all of suicidal madness, and the world is being murdered in tandem. It may be down to other countries to stop them, even though most science tells us it’s too late already to do more than perhaps slow our extinction a little.
Being anti-fact and anti-science, waging war on reality, insisting upon its own delusions over empirical evidence, the GOP has brought us to the brink of extinction without hesitation, gleefully, eagerly. Keep in mind, a core of these maniacs are Dominionist evangelicals who lust for what they call Armageddon, the final war to end all Earth, so their precious imaginary sky-hero jebus will return to save them and give them ring-side seats for a thousand years of everyone else being tortured endlessly in a fiery demise. They WANT this.
The worst enemy the world ever faced turns out to be an ideological cult called republican party policy, no policy at all but an obsession which is simply to oppose anything and everything that does not either affirm their delusions or increase their corporate bankster masters’ wealth.
The world would appear to be ending not with a bang, and not with a whimper, either, but with a lunatic’s mirthless gibbering laughter.
So let’s stop thinking categorically and start seeing human beings as apart from the shapes, the predators, the psychopaths, who must be removed from all power over anyone or anything and isolated from society. Only then might we have a chance, and stop normalizing fascism, Nazism, and all the sadistic cruelty the GOP struts and preens on the world stage.
It may require a civil war. “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable,” JFK told us. That’s President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, for those who may not know.
Bernie Sanders made this point. He asked, “Why would those we put down all the time want to join us? Why don’t we reach out and support each other?” He was so correct.
Rise Up Now.
RUN.
Be kind.
Be human.
Be humane.
/ geste
/// /// ///
